Chandigarh mulls training medicos as Covid vaccinators

Naina Mishra

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, November 27

The UT Administration is mulling over increasing vaccinators by enrolling medical students in the Covid vaccination programme whenever a vaccine is introduced by the Centre.

UT Adviser Manoj Parida today held the first-ever meeting of the state-level steering committee on a Covid vaccine in which the existing infrastructure and future challenges were discussed. Parida said, “We have formed a state-level committee by involving all government hospitals, the Municipal Corporation and the Police Department to foresee the challenges and work out a strategy of how to carry out vaccination whenever it will be available.” “We deliberated upon the need for more vaccinators because whenever a vaccine is rolled out, a vast majority of the people will need it. For the same purpose, we may make use of medical students, who will be trained for inoculation. This is also being done to ensure that the existing universal vaccination programme does not suffer,” said Parida. The role of the state-level steering committee will be to take stock of the preparedness such as checking cold chain storage points and vaccine points in the city. The committee is for inter-departmental co-ordination and will meet once a month, while another state-level task force will meet every fortnight.

The committee also deliberated on the manner of keeping track of vaccine recipients, who will be requiring more than one dose. Parida said pre-registration was essential for any beneficiary to get vaccinated. He said the Aadhaar number could be used as one of the identity proofs and one-time password (OTP) generated to confirm that the vaccine had been administered to the end user.

The UT has decided to identify more vaccination sites, besides hospitals, as and when the programme will enter the next phase wherein the vaccine will be administered to frontline workers, elderly and comorbid population.

UT seeks 25% addl cold chain inventory

The UT Administration has demanded 25 per cent more cold chain inventory from the Centre for storing a Covid vaccine in addition to the available infrastructure. The UT has 54 cold chain points with ILR and deep freezer.